Wondertime Sails to the South Pacific – Day 13

It’s been a long hard week, what with all the confused seas and bouncy, windy conditions. But today we were given a reprieve with 15 knots of wind from the east, almost on our beam, and much more comfortable seas. It is just beautiful out here: the sun is directly above us during the day, the sea still a brilliant blue and every cloud shape you can imagine is scattered across the sky. We look at the chart and see how very far we are from the nearest land and for some reason it doesn’t spark a fit of internal panic any longer. We’ve grown comfortable out here with our rolling blue backyard. We love listening to our nightly radio nets; even though our fellow puddle jumpers are hundreds of miles away it feels like they are right next door for the time we listen to all the check-ins. There is actually another boat very near to us, Cheers is about 62 miles to the east. We’ve been able to talk on the VHF and it thrilled us both to be so close in this vast body of water.

We were all able to get nice long naps in which has made a world of difference in our energy today. The girls and I made “boiled cookies” (basically butter, sugar, oats, peanut butter and cocoa that you cook up then cool spoonfuls on waxed paper). There’s no way the oven is going on for a while!

It’s looking like Monday for crossing the equator and we are getting very, very excited.

Total miles at noon: 1442
Miles since yesterday: 119
Minutes it took me to comb out the snarls in Holly’s curly hair: 45
Minutes it took me to comb out Leah’s straight hair: 2
Number of squid found on deck this morning: 2